


strangeways, here we come

by foxxing



Category: GOT7
Genre: College AU, GOT7 Tarot 19, M/M, Mild Blood, Stranger Things AU, super powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 11:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20152516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxxing/pseuds/foxxing
Summary: Im Jaebum's little brother goes missing the same day a mysterious, handsome stranger comes tumbling out of the woods. Strangeways, here we come.





	1. I.I

**Author's Note:**

> as always, i want to thank chris, who is my muse, and continues to inspire and motivate me every day to finish what i start. without her, this would not have been possible.
> 
> ♡

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise, sometime  
will come around  
[ *** ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcaeq4KDjpQ)

The worst day of Im Jaebum’s life is the day his little brother goes missing. 


	2. I.II

“Yah! Im Jaebum! You better get up!”

His mother’s shrill voice above the pounding on his bedroom door shocks him awake; sitting up in a daze as she keeps yelling at him in that blaring tone, his very own personal sentient alarm clock. Jaebum blinks into the gloom of his shadowy room and takes a deep breath. 

“I’m up, Mom,” he mumbles, but her supernatural mom hearing must pick it up anyway. The pounding ceases right away and her quiet footsteps disappear down the hall. 

Rubbing his eyes, Jaebum wonders what time it is. School has been out for a week already—winter break isn’t exactly long, only about a month, but that doesn’t mean Jaebum isn’t going to take sleeping in  _ seriously.  _ It’s his third year of college and with as much coursework as he had in the semester that had just ended, he thinks he deserves it. 

In any case, his mother had likely woken him up so he could watch his brother who, in Jaebum’s opinion, did not need to be watched.  _ He’s already 11,  _ he always says, and Youngjae, standing behind him and peeking at her from around Jaebum’s waist, always nods in agreement.  _ He rides his bike to and from school every day. He’s fine.  _

But since their dad had passed away five years earlier, it just... hasn’t been the same. 

_ Just watch him, please, Jaebum-ah,  _ she would say, dark eyes wet.  _ Please.  _

Mindlessly Jaebum gets out of bed and pushes a curtain back to douse the rest of his room in watery winter sunlight. He squints against the reflection of the sun in the icicles hanging down from the low edge of the roof, a kaleidoscope of rainbow color dancing on the dark wood of his closet door as the light passes through. He scratches unselfconsciously at his bare stomach above the waistband of his boxers and listens in the silence of the house as his mother opens his brother’s bedroom door. 

She pierces the silence with a shriek. 

“Im Jaebum!” she shouts; Jaebum sighs heavily and opens his bedroom door just as she’d been about to fling it open and likely tear it off the hinges. “Where the hell is your brother?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s—he’s not in bed!”

Jaebum grits his teeth and tries not to let his annoyance show.  _ Little shit said he’d be back in the morning before mom even woke up.  _

“He didn’t come home last night?”

His mother, dressed already in her grocery store uniform, blanches at him. “‘Didn’t come home last night’—what? Yah, Im Jaebum! What do you mean? Where is he?”

She reaches out to slap his arm, not in a mean way, but in that scolding way mothers often do, and he twists away from it with an annoyed grunt. “He was supposed to be back before you woke up, but he snuck into my room last night after you’d gone to sleep and asked if he could go spend the night at Yugyeom’s.” Jaebum rubs a tired eye. “He’s probably still there, Ma. You know how 11 year olds are.”

His mother’s face is redder than he’s ever seen it: he knows she’s angry, and mostly angry at him; she never gets angry at Youngjae despite the kid usually deserving it sometimes, like all preteens do. But Jaebum had never minded taking the blame for him. Not if it kept Youngjae happy. 

She takes a deep breath. She’s angry, but she is not bad, and Jaebum can see her trying to rationalize this in her head before she lashes out. Jaebum lays a hand on her shoulder. 

“Call Mrs. Kim. I’m sure he’s still there. Tell him to come home and that when he gets here, I’m going to kick his ass.”

Surprisingly, his mother laughs. It’s a little shaky, still nervous, and he understands. The accident that had taken their father from them had almost taken Youngjae, too, and now his mother is rife with a paranoia that any moment could be Youngjae’s last. She seems to overcome this fear momentarily and lays a palm on Jaebum’s cheek in a gesture of affection he rarely sees these days. 

“You are such a good son. But when I get home tonight, I’m kicking  _ both  _ of your asses.”

Jaebum, amused and placated, shrugs with a lazy grin. “Okay.” 

She leaves the doorway and Jaebum watches her head down the hall and into the kitchen, where a canary yellow landline is stuck on the wall like it’d been built into the frame. He leans a shoulder on the doorframe to watch her dial for a moment before disappearing back into his bedroom to rifle through his closet for something to wear and wracking his brain for something to do. 

_ Could study I guess,  _ he says to himself, thumbing through long sleeve flannel shirts and short sleeve t-shirts with rappers on the front.  _ Maybe call Jackson and Mark, see if they want to go catch a movie or something.  _ Jaebum pulls down a plain white t-shirt and a dark blue checkered flannel, shutting the closet door with a sigh. 

The truth is, he really wants to call his ex. Not because he actually loves her; he doesn’t. They both know that. He wants to call her because he’s  _ lonely _ , and his life has felt strangely empty in the last couple of weeks. He isn’t sure why. But the urge is there, all the same, and he wonders absentmindedly as he dresses if he can bribe Youngjae into not telling Mom if he brings a girl over and takes her to his room for a while. 

Just as Jaebum exits his bedroom door, he watches his mother slam the yellow plastic phone back into the cradle with a DING! that sounds uncomfortably loud in the equally uncomfortable silence that gathers in the moment after it. His mother leans her shoulder against the wall, face hidden from him; an immediate panic throbs deeply in the core of him. 

“Mom?”

Like lightning she whirls on him. Her eyes are already wet—she doesn’t shout at him, and she doesn’t fully cry, but it’s clear that she wants to. 

“Mrs. Kim said that Youngjae didn’t spend the night last night. Mrs. Kim said that Youngjae told her he was spending the night with Bambam.”

“Well did you try—“

“Calling Mrs. Bhuwakul? Of course I did, Jaebum! And you know what she said? She said Bambam came home alone last night! That halfway there Youngjae said he wasn’t feeling well and wanted to just go home!”

The panic inside him throbs, pulses deeper like a steady heartbeat. He bites his lip. “Mom—“

“Mrs. Bhuwakul said Bambam came home alone last night. Mrs. Kim said she sent the boys home around 9.” Her voice trembles.

The truth is this: Youngjae had lied. He had tried to come home alone on his bike, and hadn’t. The truth is this: no one has seen Youngjae in the last twelve hours. The truth is this: their nightmare comes alive and crashes down on them heavy like a stone. 

“Jaebum-ah, where is your little brother?”

_______

Somewhere, deep in the woods, a handsome boy bathed in blood is running. 


	3. I.III

He tries to keep his mother calm:  _ there’s no use getting hysterical, mom, I’m sure everything is fine. Maybe he snuck in last night and snuck back out this morning and went to the park to play Pokémon. You know he does that.  _

But, rational as it is, Jaebum doesn’t feel much comforted by it either. There is an ominous feeling in the air as his mother nearly tears the sleeve of his jacket where she pulls him along to the car. It’s oppressive, dark, like the grey color of the clouds that block out the winter sun as they roll by and shutter them in gloom. 

She starts the car and barely waits for Jaebum to get in the passenger seat and slam the creaking door shut before she’s nearly fishtailing out of the gravel driveway. Jaebum grips the side panel and digs his heels into the worn, dusty carpet of their 15 year old car. 

“Mom!” he barks, nervous about how fast she’s going. “Slow down!”

She does but only a little. The small town where they live is too quiet at this time of the morning; the kids are all out of school and Christmas is around the corner, but the adults all still have jobs to go to and now that rush hour is over, the paved streets are eerily empty. The one long, winding road that serves as a main passage in and out of town that branches off the downtown streets is lined with trees that have long left their leaves to crumble and decay on the damp soil of the forest floor. 

Sunlight skips through the naked treetops, illuminating his face like a zoetrope as he keeps his eyes focused out the passenger window. Now that they’re away from the cluster of downtown and getting more toward the emptiness of the woods and the park Youngjae likes to go to, his mother slows the car down considerably, and rolls her window down. The cold air that blasts in from the open window sinks its way down the collar of Jaebum’s jacket and flannel to skirt, chilly, along his back. 

_ He’s probably just at the park,  _ Jaebum had said, and he hopes that it’s true. Usually when they can’t find Youngjae or the boys at their respective houses, it’s because they’re at the park playing Pokémon on their matching Gameboys. Youngjae has always loved that park, partial most of all to the swingset. Jaebum tries to smile at the image of Youngjae with his arms linked around the slightly rusted chains, rocking slowly, lost in his little boy world where Jaebum, as much as Youngjae loves him, would never be welcome. The smile refuses to come. 

The park expands into view as they round the last curve. The ground is almost exclusively a coppery brown color, from the soil and all the leaves that have fallen and rotted into dampness. The jungle gym is deserted: the metal of the monkey bars looks frozen even from the car and the plastic slides on both ends look cold and likely have puddles of residual rain hiding at the very bottom; no kid would take the risk of looking like they peed their pants. Even the swings are empty, merely swaying back and forth in the low wind. 

Jaebum hears his mother take a shaky breath. “He’s not here, Jaebum.” 

“I—I know.” 

“Where else could he be?”

“He’s not with Auntie?” 

His mother pulls into the parking lot of the park and shakes her head. Jaebum wishes he knew how to comfort her; after the accident, comforting each other was something they never quite got good at. 

“I called her just before we left. She hasn’t seen Youngjae at the shop at all this morning.”

If Youngjae wasn’t at the park, and he wasn’t at their Auntie’s bakery, and he wasn’t at Bambam or Yugyeom’s… Jaebum swallows roughly with that anxiety gripping him by the back of the neck.  _ Then where the hell is he? _

“Auntie didn’t say she saw him walking around downtown or anything?”

His mother slams a palm against the wheel. The horn, when it blares long and loud in the utter silence of the lonely morning, startles a flock of black birds from the empty tree tops. 

“He wouldn’t do that! He’s never done that! He knows he’s not allowed to go places by himself yet, unless it’s to and from school or one of the boys’ houses!” Her voice is very close to breaking. “So where is he?”

“Mom,” Jaebum says softly. He knows she’s not angry at  _ him,  _ per se, though perhaps a little bit. Their relationship is not perfect but it has never been  _ bad.  _ “He’s 11. He’s a preteen. They break rules sometimes—“

“He doesn’t! You know he doesn’t!”

“And you’re right! He doesn’t.  _ Usually.  _ He doesn’t  _ usually  _ break rules. But that doesn’t mean he  _ won’t.  _ I broke plenty of rules at his age—“

His mother’s knuckles turn to white where she’s gripping the big, circular wheel of the car so hard it looks painful. Her voice is a warning. “Jaebum—“

But he continues, “especially the curfew related ones. He’s just like other kids, mom, all kids break those rules—“

Something inside her seems to snap. She slams both hands on the wheel and shouts at him,

“He’s not  _ like _ you, Jaebum! He’s a  _ good boy!” _

Jaebum’s blood runs ice cold. His heart makes an uncomfortable squeezing motion as he grits his teeth in the silence that follows her outburst. Neither of them say anything. The implication had been clear. 

_ Youngjae wouldn’t do this because he’s a  _ good boy.  _ You broke my rules as a child and you are a  _ bad boy.  _ Your childhood was hell on me, and now look where we are.  _

She seems to realize, just a moment too late, what that actually implies. Her eyes widen and a heartbroken look crosses her face that she had actually said that, and she goes to grab the sleeve of Jaebum’s jacket just as he leans backward out of reach to pop the door open behind him. 

“Jaebum-ah,” she says desperately, clawing at the material of his jacket when he doesn’t answer and he slides out of the car. “Jaebum-ah! You know I didn’t mean it like that. Please get in, sweetie, so we can keep looking—“

But the wounds already hurt and so the words had already done their work. Jaebum slams the door shut with a slightly shaky hand and has to try not to whirl on her; he knows this situation is stressful and he doesn’t want to be  _ mean  _ to her. But he wants, at least, something to hurt like he hurts. 

He leans down with his fists stuffed into the pockets of his jacket to conceal that he’s feeling angry. His mother has really started to cry, now, wiping tears away with one forest green sleeve in a way that makes Jaebum’s heart feel a strange thing. 

“Just go home, Mom, or to Auntie’s. I’ll walk back and I’ll look out here to see if he maybe got lost in the woods because it was dark out.”

She sniffles and starts the car. “Please get in and help me look. Jaebum-ah, you know that I didn’t mean that.”

But the truth is she probably did. And because Youngjae has always been the better sibling, despite the age gap, Jaebum doesn’t mind acknowledging that it’s true. It just hurts, is all. 

He slaps the roof of the car one time to send her off with a tight smile. She sighs and pulls out of the park, looking over her shoulder at him once before driving away and back around the curve of the main road. Jaebum watches it disappear with that heaviness in his heart until the rusted pink paint of the bumper is no longer visible. 

And then, with no other option, he begins to walk. 

  
  


***

After fifteen minutes of walking and still not at the edge of town yet, Jaebum wishes that he’d brought his Walkman. Despite keeping a keen eye out on the tree line, looking for everything and anything that might show some evidence of Youngjae being there, he can’t deny that walking so long by himself is really boring. Part of him thinks maybe he should have just stayed in the car with his mom and gone back to town to help look there, but… he shifts his shoulders uncomfortably and sniffles in the cold. The implied slap still stings. 

_ He’s not like you, Jaebum, he’s a good boy.  _

Jaebum makes a face and wipes a warm sleeve across the cold tip of his nose that won’t stop running. It’s not that he’d been  _ bad— _ he wasn’t a bad kid, not like the Moon twins who lived down the street had been. Jaebum had disobeyed curfew, got caught smoking, won (and lost) a few fights. But his grades had always been good, and he always tried to learn quickly from his mistakes; his mother had lost her temper with him sometimes, sure, as all mothers must do. But even as an adult Jaebum can rarely think of a time before the accident where she ever implied that he’d been nothing less than a good son to her before Youngjae was born and before their father died. 

Maybe it’s just favoritism. Jackson would agree: he’s the youngest brother, and therefore the favorite. His parents try not to make it obvious but it kind of is, and Jaebum thinks that Jackson would be able to spot favoritism from a mile away.  _ Dude,  _ he would say, yellow sunglasses balanced on the tip of his nose,  _ you just gotta accept it. Youngjae is like, the perfect child. It just happens.  _

He wouldn’t be wrong. Youngjae has always been exceptionally good. So far he’s never done the things that Jaebum has gotten in trouble for: his grades are impeccable, he’s too meek and shy to fight, too kind to raise a hand, thinks smoking is gross, and (mostly) obeys his curfew. Maybe almost losing him in the accident made their mother more prone to showing her secret favoritism; after all, Jaebum thinks with an ugly feeling in his chest, if the accident had taken Youngjae, then their mother would just be left with  _ him.  _

_ Don’t think like that,  _ he chastises himself.  _ That’s not fair— _

Jaebum makes a surprised noise in his throat when he kicks something half buried in the leaves and trips, falling over the frame of a chrome bicycle striped with red and blue paint. He hits the ground hard on his chest and hands having managed to pull them out of his jacket pockets fast enough to save himself from totally face planting. The ground underneath his newly scraped palms is ice cold and hard like the surface of a diamond. With a grunt he flips himself over in the loudness of the leaves and looks at what he’d tripped over, heart sinking fast. 

Youngjae’s bike is twisted. The spokes of the front wheel, bent unnaturally perpendicular to the handlebars, have mostly all been broken and stick out jaggedly like whiskers. Paint from the frame has scratched off and left smears of soil on the shining chrome base—all the damage to the bike makes it look like it’s been out here for a year and not less than 24 hours. Seeing his brother’s bike look so beat up and damaged left to rot half hidden by leaves on the side of the road makes every single worse case scenario go through his head as he scrambles to his feet. 

_ He got hit, and someone kidnapped him. He got hit by a car and it killed him and the person freaked and hid his body God knows where. He got hit and lived and they left him alone and he was scared and he crawled somewhere. Someone took him— _

The more the thoughts race the more disoriented Jaebum feels: he stumbles toward the thick of the tree line, not really seeing where he’s going, but staggering almost drunkenly toward something solid to prop himself against as the panic devours him from the inside out. He finds himself glad that he’d skipped breakfast—he hits a tree trunk with his shoulder just as the fear cramps his stomach and sends him gagging and coughing up water at the sight of his little brother’s missing bike. 

Jaebum squeezes his eyes closed. His heart thunders in his ears. The world underneath his feet tilts dangerously in two directions, pulling him apart, fresh grief like open wounds spilling blood into the soil. 

_ Youngjae,  _ he thinks, tries to hold on to a single thought, but everything is crashing together at once and no real thoughts form as he dry heaves into the trees.  _ Youngjae, Youngjae, Youngjae— _

Somewhere, to Jaebum’s left, there’s a sound far, far off in the trees that sounds like twigs snapping underfoot. Despite the panic swallowing his body whole, Jaebum’s head snaps up and he barely feels the sweat that drips into his eyes as he tries to focus into the thick darkness of the forest as it grows the further away he tries to look. He starts to think he imagined it, but then it comes again:  _ SNAPSNAP!  _ in quick succession like a branch breaking in two places at once. He digs his blunt nails into the rough bark of the tree. 

“Youngjae!” he tries to call; his voice cracks dangerously high in the middle and the rest comes out as a whispered croak. He swallows and tries again, stronger this time, an echo bouncing back to him: “Youngjae!”

The snapping sound comes again, and again, closer each time that he hears it. No cars pass by on the main road and the silence surrounding them in the dead winter makes his skin prickle both with the icy air and a weird, unsettling fear that anchors itself to his bones. Jaebum’s breath comes faster, little puffs of steam from his mouth like a steam engine, as he realizes that the snaps are getting closer and not farther away. 

And that, now, he can hear the unmistakable sound of running footsteps underneath it. 

He wants to call out again but something has made him too afraid. Jaebum squeezes his eyes closed and hugs the tree tighter, anxiety ratcheting up, realizing that the sound of the footsteps running over dead leaves and hands slapping branches and decayed bushes out of the way sound much too large, too heavy to be Youngjae. Whatever it is, it’s bigger than that, and it sounds fast: barely two minutes pass and Jaebum can nearly hear their heavy breathing. 

_ Open your eyes, you coward,  _ Jaebum screams at himself.  _ Open your eyes and see who it is! Maybe they can help you find Youngjae!  _

He feels cowardly, indeed: despite telling himself to do so, Jaebum still feels almost too scared to open his eyes, petrified about what sight will great him running out of the trees. Every monster he’s ever seen on TV or written in his little stories comes roaring to life, pounding their way through the woods and directly toward him to gobble him up the same way it had done his brother. 

_ It’s not real it’s not real it’s not real it’s not real open your eyes open your eyes open your eyes— _

And he does. Jaebum opens his eyes wide just as the thing comes into view, dressed in dingy white from head to toe like some kind of hellish angel. 

It is no thing, no monster. It’s a boy around his age or maybe a little younger: dark brown hair to his ears is slicked with something too dark to make out from here, clothes streaked with dirt and red blood like ink. His hands are bare, but bloody like his dirty shoes, Jaebum notices in complete confusion (and some awe, too; this is what his imagination has cooked up to cope with what happened to Youngjae?) and he must be cold, his hot breath pumping out of him in a steady stream. His long neck looks bruised and bloodied, too; Jaebum only realizes that he’s handsome when the boy finally turns his head where he’d been looking over his shoulder and is jerked backward by Jaebum’s quick hand snatching out to fist in the back of his loose and dirtied shirt. 

Before Jaebum can even get a word out, the boy grunts and takes a swing. 

“Whoa!” Jaebum shouts, ducking just in time to miss the balled up fist dotted with bleeding knuckles. The boy in his grasp grunts and bucks against his grip, constantly swinging and lunging at Jaebum even with the awkward angle of his grasp. “Calm down, dude, what’s going on—“

He doesn’t answer. The boy grunts more and fights back harder; Jaebum loses his grip on the shirt for a moment before regaining it and catching a clip to the jaw, cheek stinging from where the boy’s hands had turned to claws and raked down his face on one side. Jaebum, having won a few fights in his heyday against boys much bigger and much more talented and much more strategic than himself, it’s not as hard as he’d thought to grab the other boy’s wrist and grab both behind his back. The grunting turns to frantic, almost animalistic growls and noises of distress as Jaebum stomps a heel against the back of the boy’s legs to get him to drop to his knees. 

“Relax!” he barks loudly, and it’s loud and sudden enough that the boy stops fighting and tenses up so much that Jaebum can feel it in his hands on the boy’s wrists. His skinny chest, visible just barely through the billowing material of his dirtied cotton shirt, heaves with impatience, effort, and fear. 

Jaebum continues, “I’m not going to hurt you. Okay? I’m not gonna hurt you.” Jaebum bends down; the boy leans away but doesn’t start fighting again. He points to Youngjae’s bike. “That’s my little brother’s bike. He’s missing, and I’m out here looking for him. Have you seen him?”

The boy doesn’t say anything. Not even a noise. 

“Who are you?” Jaebum asks, feeling anxious again. He hopes maybe this will get an answer. “Where did you come from? How did you get out into the woods?” 

But, again, he doesn’t answer. His chest continues to heave and Jaebum watches in a confused sort of awe as his breath streaks the air with smoke, sweating, tense against Jaebum’s grip but no longer fighting it. He wonders what would happen if he let the boy go, but a part of him thinks, perhaps irrationally, that this strange guy who’d come running out of the woods could be a link to figuring out what happened to his brother. 

When he still receives no answer, Jaebum tentatively lets go of both wrists, expecting the guy to bolt, but he doesn’t. He stays on his knees in the damp soil but brings his arms forward to grab his opposite elbows in a protective gesture. Jaebum, trying to move slowly, steps around him and has to catch a quick hand that shoots out to defend when Jaebum slowly sinks to his knees in front of him. 

“Relax,” Jaebum says softly; the guy blinks at him, and Jaebum has the sudden thought that maybe the guy either doesn’t speak Korean or can’t speak or hear at all, but the tension goes out of his wrist and he returns it to the fold when Jaebum lets go. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Jaebum bites his lip, unsure how to proceed. It  _ seems  _ like the guy can at least understand him, maybe, since he’s relaxing when Jaebum says relax, but it could also just be the tone of his voice. If the guy can’t speak or understand Korean, Jaebum isn’t really sure where to go from there: he could try what little English he knows from Mark and Jackson, but maybe this guy doesn’t understand that, either. 

And in any case, the guy doesn’t try to say anything either. The guy just stares at him: Jaebum stares back, obviously unsettled by the fact that he’s covered in blood and obvious bruises and cuts, but startled by the fact that, despite it, he looks quite handsome. His bottom lip is thick, split with a small cut in the center, but a perfect match to the one on top with a barely perceptible cupid’s bow. Thick eyebrows sit darkly over big, deep brown eyes, burned to coffee in the sun when it slips through the cloud cover and shines on his face. 

He realizes that, as they stare at each other kneeling on the cold ground on the side of the road, they have to start  _ somewhere.  _ So, Jaebum tries to start simple. 

“Do you have a name?” 

There’s a pause, the barely visible head tilt like the guy is processing his question, which tells Jaebum he can hear, and probably understands. The guy blinks and Jaebum is surprised when a deep, masculine voice speaks with a little whisper like his throat is raw. 

“Jin. Young.” The guy cocks his head a little further, eyebrows furrowed like he’s trying to remember something. “Jin. Young. Jinyoung.”

So he does understand. Jaebum’s heart starts to pound for some curious reason. 

“Okay, Jinyoung. Where did you come from?”

Jinyoung blinks big, uncertain doe eyes at him. He looks a little afraid, but stoic, too; he doesn’t answer this question. Instead, he points a finger at Jaebum, sitting so close his fingertip is nearly in his chest. 

Jaebum looks down at it. Then up at Jinyoung. Then down, then back up. Jinyoung doesn’t move it and he just blinks. 

“What?” 

Jinyoung shakes his head. “You.” 

“Me?” 

Jinyoung nods up and down, slowly. “You.” he cocks his head like a dog listening to a very small sound, and Jaebum quickly comes to understand that this is a thinking gesture. “Name.” 

“Oh, you want to know my name?” 

He nods again. “Yes.” 

“I’m Im Jaebum.” 

Jinyoung blinks owlishly at him. “Im Jaebum.”

Jaebum tries to smile: if Youngjae were here, sitting in front of this strange guy, he’d be over the moon.  _ Hyung, it’s like all my stories. Maybe he’s an alien. Or—or—hyung, maybe he’s a top secret spy! Maybe he’s a wizard! Can he do magic? _

But it just hurts instead: juxtaposed over this is the image of his brother’s crumpled bike behind them, and Jaebum feels hot tears burning his eyes. The guy in front of him just watches silently as he struggles to hold them in and ultimately fails. He wipes an arm across his eyes and the sleeve comes away wet. 

Jaebum chokes out an awkward laugh. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Jinyoung tilts his head. 

“Yeah.” Jaebum sniffles. “Um, sorry is like, um—“

Jinyoung does something strangely human: he lifts both hands with his palms out and shakes them lightly in a  _ no, no  _ gesture. 

“I know sorry. You. Sorry.” Jinyoung frowns, so comical looking and out of place on the seriousness of his strange and handsome face that Jaebum has to choke back a laugh. Jinyoung looks back up at him. “Why?”

Jaebum is a little struck dumb by the intensity of his gaze. How does he even begin to answer that? It’s clear Jinyoung understands him in some capacity. He probably understands nearly everything Jaebum says—it makes him wonder if the disconnect between language and Jinyoung is the result of something more sinister than he’d originally thought. What if he’d been living in the woods his whole life? What if he’s from some secret commune no one’s ever heard of? What if—and this scenario scares him more than the rest because of the possibility of it—he’s been kept somewhere under lock and key his whole life with limited contact?

So Jaebum chooses not to answer. He half turns, instead, the sudden movement making Jinyoung visibly tense up until he seems to realize Jaebum is just pointing at the bike still laying twisted and broken on the ground. 

“Do you know what that is?”

“Bike.” 

“Do you know where it came from?”

Jinyoung’s head cocks; he shakes it. “No.” 

Jaebum swallows hard on an uncomfortable feeling in his chest. “My brother is missing. My little brother. His name is Youngjae.” 

“Missing?”

He nods. “Missing.”

“Missing…” Jinyoung frowns like he’s frustrated. He seems to know the word but not what it means. “What is missing?”

“Like—gone. We can’t find him.”

“Can’t find—?” the gears seem to turn faster. “Oh. Missing.”

“Yeah. We’ve been looking for him all morning, me and Mom—“

Something must startle him: Jinyoung’s deep brown eyes go super wide in alarm, and he actually flinches backward from him to land on his backside when Jaebum says  _ Mom.  _ A frightened wheeze escapes his mouth as Jinyoung scrambles away a little bit and looks terrified while Jaebum just stares at him open mouthed and confused.

“Are you okay?” Jaebum asks, even though he’s unsure if he’ll get a good answer. 

“You—know Mom.” Jinyoung folds his arms tightly to his body and starts to shake a little, face pinched in anxiety now mixed with staunch distrust. “How?”

“Mom—?” Jinyoung flinches again when Jaebum asks, like it had been a physical slap. “Yes, my Mom—“ 

“ _ Our  _ Mom,” Jinyoung corrects; bitterly, even, and it would be funny if he didn’t look so scared and mistrustful of Jaebum now where he had seemed to start coming around. “Mom. You are with  _ them.” _

Jinyoung starts to slowly inch backward; it takes a moment for Jaebum to realize that the bitterness in Jinyoung’s voice is implying that he thinks Jaebum is part of  _ them— _ whoever that is. The way Jinyoung has reacted to hearing  _ Mom  _ and then trying to correct him into saying  _ our  _ Mom makes Jaebum think that his theory of Jinyoung being locked up somewhere with no contact for a long time is getting more plausible by the second. 

Thinking quickly, Jaebum reaches into his pocket and pulls out his beat up leather wallet, a gift from his father when he’d turned eighteen. Jinyoung shifts away a bit quicker, more suspicious, and Jaebum realizes he needs to rectify this situation ASAP or Jinyoung is going to book it. Despite being on his high school soccer team, Jaebum isn’t sure he could keep up with someone as wild and afraid as Jinyoung. 

He flips open his wallet to the plastic slip covers sewn into the side containing tiny pictures of his family and some of his friends. Jaebum makes a face unconsciously as he flips past the one of him and his ex-girlfriend that he’s yet to remove, looking for the one of him, Youngjae, and their mother taken just last year near her birthday as a gift from Jaebum. He wiggles it out of the sleeve and holds it out to Jinyoung, who stops moving and actually scoots back toward him to lean in and look at it. 

Jaebum shakes the photo lightly. “This is my Mom.” 

Jinyoung’s eyebrows furrow. He looks at Jaebum over the top of the photograph and Jaebum’s heart does that weird  _ ddu-du, ddu-du  _ stuttering thing again. 

“Your Mom?” Jinyoung keeps looking at him, eyes intense. Jaebum can almost see the gears turning in Jinyoung’s head as he processes the new information. “ _ Your  _ Mom.”

“Yeah,” he says softly.  _ “My  _ mom. and Youngjae’s.”

Jinyoung gets back to his knees in front of Jaebum, closer now than they had been, so close that their knees touch in the dirt and body heat radiates off Jinyoung. There’s something so _ human  _ about it—Jaebum never  _ really  _ considered that Jinyoung was an alien or anything (even though Youngjae would have), but there’s something comforting about the  _ humanity _ of this, body heat and blood that stains his skin and clothes. 

He points at the photo, to where Youngjae is standing next to Jaebum’s chair and in front of their mother, proudly grinning wide enough to show the checkered piano of his smile with the last of his missing baby teeth. Even from the back, bleached through with sunlight, he can see that smile and his heart aches. 

“Youngjae is missing?” 

Jaebum nods. “That’s his bike back there.” 

Jinyoung looks over his shoulder at it, then back at him.

“Broken.” 

An apt description of their family at the moment, though not what he meant—he’s not exactly sure Jinyoung can pose a thought like that, or ponder that kind of concept, but it occurs to Jaebum that maybe Jinyoung’s lack of communication skills aren’t due to any lacking at all. Maybe  _ Jaebum  _ is lacking in this situation. 

But for now it’s clear he’s talking about the bike, and so Jaebum nods again, wishing that the fear gripping the back of his neck would just let go. Now that he has seemed to get Jinyoung to trust him, he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he really is the missing link to Youngjae. That even if Youngjae’s disappearance and Jinyoung’s sudden materializing aren’t connected (but he thinks they must be, somehow, in some way), that this strange boy in the woods can help him find the one most important thing in his whole life. 

Jaebum bites his lip. 

“I need you to help me find him.”


	4. II.I

After an awfully long time of Jinyoung standing a good distance away while Jaebum messed with the twisted frame of Youngjae’s abandoned bike, heartsick while he did it, Jaebum manages to get it into a position where he can wheel it along in front of him on the back tire. The handlebars are twisted in such an ugly way; he’s not sure if maybe he’s just projecting his feelings about Youngjae being missing onto the chrome and flecked-paint frame, but it disturbs him in a profound way to hold the handlebars folded backward and twisted. 

Once he gets it rolling, he motions with his head for Jinyoung to follow along. There’s nothing to do now but walk: he thinks they’re probably about a thirty minute walk from town, if that, so not terribly far. However he thinks it might be a little bizarre for Jinyoung to just be blindly following a stranger home and for him to be  _ leading _ a stranger (who is dressed in what looks like psychiatric hospital clothes and is covered with blood, no less) to his house. But, in Jinyoung’s case, Jaebum isn’t really sure what Jinyoung’s other options are besides  _ keep running  _ and  _ hope for the best.  _

In Jaebum’s case, his somewhat irrational conviction that Jinyoung is his only link to finding out what happened to Youngjae keeps him from turning Jinyoung away. 

After a few minutes of them walking along the roadside, Jaebum stops and sets the bike down to remove his windbreaker, shivering a little when it’s all the way off and flapping in the low breeze that blows. He holds the color-blocked yellow and blue atrocity out to Jinyoung who just looks at it with blank curiousness. 

“Here, put this on.”

Jinyoung takes it, cautiously, but just holds it. “Why?”

“Because it’s cold,” Jaebum says, picking up the bike to resume pushing it as they walk along. “And you don’t have one.”

If Jinyoung thinks anything in particular about this, he doesn’t say so: he blinks at Jaebum’s back as he moves ahead before sliding his arms into the windbreaker where it’s already been warmed. 

They walk in silence for a while. The only sound is their shoes crunching on dead leaves and the squeaking, repetitive  _ eee, eee, eee  _ sounds of Youngjae’s bent bike wheel as Jaebum pushes it along. If he thought it would do any good to ask Jinyoung questions he would do it. But so far the handsome stranger with blood smeared under his nose and dried on cuts on his eyebrow and cheeks and neck doesn’t do anything but flex his equally bloodily knuckles in and out of fists at his sides in a startlingly human display of discomfort. 

Jaebum is just gearing up to ask him a question he’s sure he won’t get an answer to when there’s the low rumbling of a car engine coming up behind them. Panicked, Jaebum steps in front of Jinyoung to hide most of him from the road as it approaches: at first, he thinks they’re going to just drive by, but he recognizes the mustard yellow paint and the shining chrome grill of Jackson’s Trans-Am as it slows to a stop. 

Jackson leans out the window, round yellow sunglasses slipping to the edge of his nose in surprise. Behind him in the cab, American rap music plays and he doesn’t bother turning it down. 

“Jaebum?”

Jaebum sighs. He’s sure Jackson is going to have a  _ lot  _ of questions—he himself has more questions than answers right now, if he’s going to tell the truth—but a familiar face after so much weirdness of the morning and in the wake of finding Youngjae missing relieves him more than he expected. 

“Jackson. Thank god.” 

He has noticed that Jinyoung is standing much closer to him than he had been before Jackson stopped. He can feel the warmth radiating off Jinyoung’s chest through his stiff, bloodied shirt against his back, and when the breeze dies down every few minutes he can feel Jinyoung’s breath hot on the back of his neck. Jaebum is unsure what kind of gesture this is: one of protection? Or one of fear? Distrust of someone new? Jaebum isn’t exactly sure, but either way he swallows hard. 

“What the hell are you doin’ out here, hyung? What is that? And  _ who  _ is that?”

“Listen…” Jaebum stops and sighs. There’s really no good way to introduce the fact that his brother is missing and Jaebum found a random bloody guy running in the woods and didn’t immediately go in the other direction, so he just gets on with it: “Jackson, will this bike fit in the trunk?”

Between glances at the bike and Jinyoung standing extremely closely behind it, Jackson eyes the bent bike in Jaebum’s hands like he’s sizing it up before the lightbulb in his head seems to come on and he slams a palm against the power button of the radio.

“Isn’t that Youngjae’s bike?”

Jaebum nods, too afraid to answer out loud. 

“Did you—oh, god, hyung, what happened? Where is he?” 

“I don’t know, Jackson. I don’t know.” 

He tips the sunglasses all the way down off his nose to look at Jinyoung behind him. 

“So who is  _ that?”  _

Jaebum turns, just enough to see that Jinyoung’s face is about six inches from his, standing nearly against the back of him like Jaebum really is a shield. His heart flutters uncomfortably before he turns back to Jackson and bites his lips. 

“His name is Jinyoung.” 

Jackson’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “Okay. And?”

“That’s all I know.”

“You—“ Jackson makes a disbelieving noise in his throat before he turns off the car despite being in the middle of the road. “Hold on, your brother goes missing, you find his messed up bike on the side of the road, a guy comes out of the woods covered in blood coincidentally right near where Youngjae’s bike is, and you  _ let him follow you?”  _

Fear strikes Jaebum in the heart like a bolt of lightning. His whole body stiffens and Jinyoung must feel it: his eyes are hard and already on Jaebum’s when Jaebum turns like he’s hoping for some explanation.  _ How could I have been so stupid?  _ Jaebum thinks to himself, panicked.  _ What if he’s the one who did it?  _

“No.” Jinyoung’s voice is cold, not unlike it always is so far, but there’s a component of anger to it, as though he’s offended at the implication. “Not me.” 

Jaebum can’t break his eyes away. Jinyoung’s are so dark, lighter than his own and especially lightened to coffee color in the watery sunlight overhead, but they are deep, and hold a history inside of them that seems inexplicable and insurmountable. But he finds that it draws him in so strongly, some tide to a foreign moon. The livewire of his heart thrums deeply inside of him like god drums. 

Jackson’s voice drifts to him from behind. “Yah! Im Jaebum! Are you really going to believe him? You—you just  _ found  _ this guy!”

Struggling to break eye contact, Jaebum takes a deep breath and finally manages it so that he can turn back to Jackson with what he hopes is the real despair displayed plainly on his face. 

“I know it doesn’t make sense, Jackson, and I can’t explain it, but—I think he can help me find Youngjae.” 

Jackson blanches outright. The black beanie pulled down over his ears gets pushed back and off by his hand as he runs a hand through his messy hair in disbelief. 

“You can’t be serious.” 

Jaebum bites his lip again, unsure how to convey the feeling inside of him that if they plan on ever finding out what happened to Youngjae and even attempting to guess where he might be, that  _ just maybe  _ the guy he’d caught running out of the woods where  _ no one is supposed to be  _ could actually help them. Maybe he’s feeling unreasonably influenced by the strength of Youngjae’s imagination. Maybe he’s thinking irrationally, as if Youngjae’s conspiracy theories about an alien coming out of the woods or top secret bad guys or spies or ninjas or whatever little boy brains conjure up alone in their imaginary worlds where big brothers can’t follow could be true. Maybe that feeling, as crazy and irrational as it may seem, might  _ just be true.  _

And it’s all he has. It’s the only connection. 

“I know it’s crazy—“

“You’re damn right it’s crazy, hyung—!” 

“—but can you just trust me on this?” Jaebum almost pleads. Jaebum moves his arms quickly to clasp his hands together; the sudden movement must startle Jinyoung because Jaebum feels one hand grip his bicep and the warmth of his palm feels like it’s burning Jaebum through his flannel shirt. “Please. I know it’s crazy. I can't explain it either. But Jackson, I think he’s my only chance at finding Youngjae. Whoever he is, he’s my only chance.” 

There’s a long, drawn out moment where Jinyoung grips Jaebum’s arm and looks at Jaebum and Jaebum looks at Jackson and Jackson looks at Jaebum. He thinks that Jackson is going to turn the car back on with a noise of disgust and leave them there, which maybe he will have earned, if Jackson’s theory that Jinyoung is somehow  _ responsible  _ for Youngjae disappearing is true. But the way Jinyoung looked at him— _ No. Not me.  _ Those coffee colored eyes. Jaebum can’t help but believe him and he hopes that, in doing so, Jackson will believe  _ him.  _

He must: Jackson sighs and turns the car back on, leaning down to pop the trunk for the frame of Youngjae’s bike. 

“Fine. Get in.”

With an audible breath of relief, Jaebum jerks the bike back up to the busted back wheel and pushes it up the slight embankment toward the trunk of Jackson’s car. As he’s trying to fidget with it and get it to fit, Jinyoung remains standing right up next to him, chest to Jaebum’s elbow in a way that he’s sure the constant jabs must be annoying but doesn’t seem to bother him. Jinyoung keeps his head turned toward the road behind them for a while until he hears Jaebum make a noise of triumph as the bike frame sinks into the trunk on top of some black garbage bags  _ just  _ right so that he can close the trunk. Before he does, though, one hand on the trunk door, he touches the ruined chrome of the bike and blinks away the sadness that fills his heart like a tiny bucket in torrential downpour. 

“Jaebum.” Jinyoung’s voice says. “Hyung.” 

He’s so surprised by Jinyoung using the formality that he turns to look at him not bothering to wipe the tears away. He finds himself wanting to ask:  _ do you just know hyung or are you using it because Jackson did? Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from and what are you doing to me? _

“You believe me?”

“Huh?”

Jinyoung pauses; cocks his head to the side just a tiny fraction and squints his eyes like he’s computing the answer. 

“Not me,” Jinyoung says again.  _ No. Not me.  _ He nods in the direction of Jackson. “He thinks it’s me.” 

“Oh. I don’t—I think he’s just confused.” Jaebum blinks at him and feels the way his heart gets that airy, almost uneasy feeling to it when he looks into Jinyoung’s eyes for too long. Jinyoung seems to have no problem holding intense eye contact and doesn’t look away. “I am too. But—I don’t think he really believes you did it.”

“You believe me.” Jinyoung repeats, but with the cadence of a statement this time and not a question. If Jaebum didn’t know better he would think he’s about to smile. 

“Yes, I believe you.” He swallows and finally turns to shut the trunk lid. “Come on, come get in the car.”

“Car?”

Jaebum, blinking the wetness from his eyes, almost does smile at the skepticism on Jinyoung’s face as he eyes Jackson’s yellow eye-sore sports car where Jaebum leads him to the back door. He gestures vaguely at the whole thing. “Yeah. Car.” 

After he slides in when Jaebum holds the door open for him, Jaebum gets into the front seat and turns around to look at Jinyoung where he’s sitting just behind his seat and looking suspicious. Jackson turns the radio back on and Jaebum notices the way that Jinyoung looks at it: there’s some element of fear in that look, recognition, too, but mostly a strange, trepidatious familiarity. His dark eyes roam uneasily around the rest of the interior as Jackson zooms down the empty road before they come back to land on Jaebum’s. 

Incredibly, he wrinkles his nose in distaste. “It’s ugly.” 

Jaebum, totally caught off guard, bursts into laughter. He tips his head back against the seat and cackles, laughing even harder when Jackson gets offended and honks  _ what’s ugly?!  _ in Jinyoung’s direction. Where Jinyoung had initially flinched away from the sudden, loud sound of Jaebum’s laughter, Jaebum finds that he’s pleased in the depths of his chest to see that a smile has spread sweet and genuine on Jinyoung’s face. 

_ Handsome.  _ Interesting word to choose for someone still covered in blood who looks, if he’s honest, a little insane. But where the stoicism of his face beforehand had been good looking, this, too, a genuine smile where Jaebum thought him incapable, only serves to elevate him to  _ handsome.  _ Handsome in a way that his fragile bird’s egg heart is confused by but not afraid of. 

Their eyes hold as Jaebum comes down from the laugh. Jackson doesn’t notice, too busy muttering to himself in offense and navigating now through the side streets of their small town to get to Jaebum’s house. A seriousness descends on them; Jinyoung’s smile fades when Jaebum’s does. 

_ No. Not me.  _

_ You believe me.  _

Jaebum feels his nails dig into the buttery leather of the Trans Am’s front bench seat. Jinyoung just keeps watching him, watching him, watching him, eyes like distant planets keeping him in orbit. 

_ Yes, I believe you.  _


	5. II.II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i will surprise you, sometime  
i'll come around  
  
[ when you're down ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcaeq4KDjpQ)

When they’re a couple streets away from Jaebum’s house, Jackson finally expresses what has likely been on his mind the entire drive since picking up Jaebum and the stranger in the backseat off the side of the road. 

“You know,” he says, and lowly, like he doesn’t want Jinyoung to hear. Jaebum flicks his eyes to the rear view mirror only to see Jinyoung staring intently back at him as though he hasn’t looked away once and Jaebum immediately averts his eyes. Jackson continues obliviously, “I don’t think you’ve thought this through at all.”

“What do you mean?” Jaebum asks. He’s kind of offended but not really—Jackson is right. He  _ hasn’t  _ thought this through. There was the moment where he had questioned if maybe Jinyoung was the  _ reason  _ Youngjae disappeared, but the weird moment they shared dissolved that theory, even though he can’t explain  _ why.  _ Everything else, though? Yeah. Jaebum hasn’t considered it one bit. 

Jackson jumps on this immediately. “I mean, you just blindly believe him that he doesn’t have anything to do with your little brother disappearing?”

“I already told you, I can’t explain it but I know he didn’t.”

“C’mon. You’re not that naive, dude.”

Jaebum feels himself get a bit irritable. “I’m not being naive. Have you considered you’re looking at this too obviously? Him coming out of the woods near Youngjae’s bike could easily be coincidence. What if I think he can help us find Youngjae because whatever hurt him, hurt Youngjae, too?” 

At this, Jackson is silent. Jaebum feels quietly victorious: he can see the gears turning in the back of Jackson’s big, dark eyes as he turns into Jaebum’s neighborhood. If anything is going to convince Jackson that he’s  _ sure  _ Jinyoung isn’t involved, it’s this.

“We have to consider that possibility,” Jaebum continues. “He can barely even speak properly, what makes you think he’s capable of getting rid of Youngjae so easily?”

The phrasing makes his stomach hurt. Again his eyes flick to the mirror, expecting Jinyoung to be looking away, but their eyes meet with a jolt. If Jaebum didn’t know any better he could swear there’s actually an annoyed tinge to Jinyoung’s blank face. 

Jackson just sighs. “I guess you’re right. But that doesn’t answer all the other questions.”

They turn onto Jaebum’s street and even from here he can see that the driveway is empty. His mother must not have come home yet, then, and he finds himself relieved. 

“Like what?”

“Whose clothes are you gonna give him? Yours won’t fit, your mom’s won’t fit, and he can’t stay in those bloody clothes. He looks like he escaped the asylum!”

Without a good answer, Jaebum just sinks a bit into the seat as Jackson continues. 

“Where is he gonna sleep? Your mom will notice someone in Youngjae’s empty room. You think your mom will let someone no one knows anything about sleep on the couch? Especially if she gets suspicious of him?” Jackson barks a fake laugh like  _ HA!  _ as he pulls into the gravel of the driveway. He turns off the car and looks at Jaebum. “Most importantly, if he doesn’t speak, how are you going to get him to say anything that is going to help?”

He brings up so many good points. All things that Jaebum  _ hadn’t  _ thought of, of course, when he decided to rescue Jinyoung from the woods. If it could even be  _ called  _ a rescue. Since he’s not sure what Jinyoung’s whole story is, who knows what Jinyoung was actually running from out there. 

“I don’t know,” Jaebum says honestly. He can feel Jinyoung staring a hole into the side of his head and doesn’t look over. “You’re right. I didn’t think of any of that. But Jackson—“

Surprisingly, though, Jackson stops him with a warm palm on his wrist where it rests on the back of the bench seat, fingers dangling. His voice softens. “I know. Youngjae is missing and this is all you have. I know. We’re going to figure this out, hyung, and we’ll use Terminator back there however we can.”

Jaebum’s heart squeezes. He doesn’t know how he got so lucky in life with friends and yet remained so unlucky in love, but he thinks that for the value of Jackson’s friendship, the scales have evened themselves out anyway. He doesn’t acknowledge the way Jinyoung’s eyes have finally left his face to linger on the way Jackson had touched his wrist. 

“Lucky for you,” Jackson says cheerily, leaning down to pop the trunk, “I have the solution to one of your problems.”

“Which is?”

Jackson grins that million dollar grin and lets his sunglasses slip to the end of his nose again. “The reason I was out of town was to visit one of my designer friends in the city. He gave me a ton of old collection items that I was planning on donating to the second hand store on 8th street but—I think your friend here is actually a perfect fit.”

That actually is a relief. He wouldn’t have minded lending Jinyoung some of his clothes—they would have fit a little weird, maybe been a bit too big, especially because Jinyoung’s shoulders are so narrow and his hips are quite slender, too. They could have cinched some pants with a belt or something to keep them up, probably, but Jackson’s extremely serendipitous bag of clothes makes Jaebum feel a lot better. As he gets out of the car and goes to open Jinyoung’s door, he thinks about seeing Jinyoung clean and in his clothes and has to suppress a weird shiver. 

“Cold,” Jinyoung says mildly, blinking at Jaebum in the sunlight as he closes the car door. He’s still wearing Jaebum’s colorblock wind breaker over his ruined clothes and he hopes that’s enough to camouflage him until they get him into the house. 

“Don’t move,” Jaebum says, going to help Jackson get Youngjae’s bike from its position in the trunk. The two of them finally get it yanked out with a squeaking protest from the frame of the car, and he leaves Jackson to collect the bags of clothing from the trunk as he wheels Youngjae’s bike to the side of the house that’s hidden from the road. 

He turns, intending to come back around the side of the house to let them all in, and jumps when Jinyoung is standing right behind him. He’d been so quiet even on the gravel on the driveway and the dried, dead leaves that Jaebum hadn’t even heard him. 

“Jesus,” Jaebum says, hand over his heart where it beats in double time from the shock. “You scared me.” 

“Scared,” Jinyoung repeats, and then frowns. He wonders if it’s genuine—it’s almost too perfect, like the caricature of an old timey comedian frowning on a black and white television. The look clears a moment later. “I’m sorry.” 

Jaebum thinks about touching him for a moment, just a calming sort of tap on the arm, but rethinks it. “It’s okay. Let’s go inside.”

Jinyoung seems to sense the urgency and follows closely behind Jaebum while doing very little to actually try and conceal himself from the rest of the neighborhood. Mostly everyone is gone to work, and the kids of the neighborhood are most likely at a winter camp or visiting family for the holidays, but there’s a few older people on the block Jaebum is extremely worried about coming out of their houses to ogle the bloody boy in Jaebum’s jacket. Almost pushing both him and Jackson, he ushers them toward the rickety front porch and through the front door when he unlocks it. 

The house is quiet and dusky with weak afternoon light filtering in through thin curtains. Dust motes dance in the bars of light that stripe the carpet in the living room, over the back of the couch against the window and spilling onto the floor. Jinyoung blinks mildly at all the beat up, second hand furniture in their square living room and Jaebum pretends that he’s not curious about what Jinyoung is thinking about it. 

Jackson nudges him with an elbow. “C’mon, let’s find something for him to wear so he can take a shower, and then we can start looking.” 

They follow Jackson into the small kitchen. Jinyoung once again busies himself looking around at everything: a pale shade of yellow is the common theme, from the dish towels hanging off the oven handle to the formica table top where Jackson unceremoniously dumps the black bag of clothes he’d brought inside. He starts to dig through it and size up Jinyoung with his eyes like he’s looking for a perfect fit. 

“The shoes we can clean,” Jackson says mildly. Jaebum watches Jinyoung look at the drawings on the fridge that Youngjae had drawn, some stuck with magnets and others haphazardly taped. “Tell him to take off the jacket.”

“Can hear you,” Jinyoung says, and shoots Jackson a glance that seems to make Jackson a little nervous for some reason. Jaebum, amused, just smiles; Jinyoung catches it and almost smiles back as he removes the windbreaker. 

“Turn around.” When Jinyoung doesn’t move, Jackson makes a twirling motion with his finger impatiently. “C’mon! Give me a twirl!”

“Twirl?” Jinyoung asks, but seems to understand the concept of Jackson’s rotating finger. Jinyoung spins himself in a very awkward, stilted circle before looking at Jackson mistrustfully. “Why?”

“I need to see what your body shape is so I can guess what size will fit,” Jackson replies offhandedly. He ignores Jinyoung’s stronger look of mistrust mixed with slight confusion and shifts through the multi colored pile like a dumpster diver. 

Jackson clears his throat as he holds up a pair of shorts that look  _ way  _ too short for the winter time; he puts them back down and Jaebum says nothing when he realizes he’s embarrassed to have momentarily thought of Jinyoung wearing them. 

“First thing, you’re awfully skinny. Didn’t they feed you anything?”

Jinyoung doesn’t answer. Jackson sighs and just continues, 

“But you have a nice shape. You’ve got…” Jackson pauses like he’s not sure how to phrase the next thing he’s going to say, and glances at Jaebum for help. 

“What?”

“He—“ Jackson glances at Jinyoung and then back at Jaebum. In something verging on stage whisper, he hides his mouth behind his hand and asks, “how should I say that he has a really round ass?”

This, for some reason, is  _ also  _ very embarrassing. Jaebum, who had definitely  _ not  _ looked at anything other than Jinyoung’s face and maybe the top of his torso, feels his face go red hot in the cheeks at the implication Jackson is making about the strange guy he’d found running in the woods having a nice ass. On top of being handsome, which is something else Jaebum needs to deal with at a later time. 

“I—I don’t—I don’t know!” Jaebum sputters, and gets more red when Jackson laughs. 

“You mean to tell me you haven’t noticed? I’m surprised, hyung, you usually like to look at ass—“

Jaebum nearly flies across the kitchen to break Jackson’s neck. He doesn’t, though, only feigning forward with a mouthed threat of  _ shut up or I’ll kill you  _ on his lips and a dark, blood red blush still staining his cheeks. 

“Tell you what,” Jackson says gleefully, having somehow outed Jaebum for a secret that he hadn’t been sure he’d been holding, and holds up a pair of rusty orange jeans flared at the bottom and a simple black turtleneck. “These should fit, and you’ll look nice. A little expensive.” Jackson looks at Jaebum for this part: “if anyone asks, he’s your cousin from Seoul and that’s why he’s got such fancy clothes.”

Jaebum nods. He’s not sure that anyone in Isang would believe a lie that thin, but it’s all they have to go on. 

After waiting for Jackson to awkwardly (and miraculously—Jaebum expresses his surprise with a colorful string of swear laced questions) dig up a pair of designer looking underwear from the pile, Jackson finally hands it over and shoos him away. 

“I’ll clean this up, and I’ll go put these and the other bags in your room for him so he has clothes to wear.” Jackson cocks his head and gets a funny smile on his face. “Feels kinda like parenting, huh?”

_ Not really,  _ Jaebum wants to say, but the way Jinyoung has been looking at him for such a long time is making words stick in his throat. He just nods at Jackson and then turns to Jinyoung, clearing his throat before he speaks. 

“C’mon, I’ll show you the bathroom. You can take a shower and change into these.” He motions with the clothes. “And we’ll wash your shoes, too.” 

Jackson watches this with a raised eyebrow which Jaebum pointedly ignores. He waits for Jinyoung to toe off his shoes by the front door, neatly aligning them with the rest before following Jaebum down the dark, shadowy hallway to where the bathroom door lets in the smallest bar of light. 

He pushes the door open, letting Jinyoung go in before he follows and closes it softly behind him. Suddenly he feels incredibly awkward— _ you haven’t thought this through, have you?  _ Jackson’s disembodied voice reminds him, and he grinds his teeth. How is he supposed to show someone who is the same age as him how to use a shower? Aside from being bloody and a little dirty from running in the woods for god knows how long, Jinyoung looks clean and well taken care of. He should know, right? But then what if he doesn’t, and—

With a noise in his throat Jaebum decides to stop overthinking it and just do it. He sets the small stack of clothes on the long counter and pushes the curtain on the tub back. The deep, ocean blue tiles bounce an almost cerulean reflection on his face from the tiny window behind Jinyoung as he points to the handle. 

“Here’s how you turn it on,” he says, almost stuttering, but managing to even out his voice. “Pull it up and turn it left or right to adjust the temperature. Um, pull this thing here so the water comes out of the shower head, that thing up there—“

“Jaebum hyung,” Jinyoung says softly. The tone of his voice surprises Jaebum into jerking the water on and the loud rushing of the water out of the faucet masks the wild beating of his heart as he stands. Jinyoung is standing much closer than he had been and he touches Jaebum’s arm lightly with a smile. “I know how.” 

Immediately Jaebum feels like the biggest fool in the world. Of course he knows how to use a fucking shower. He closes his eyes and feels his cheeks heat up again with that bone deep embarrassment. 

“Of course you do,” he says, and sighs. Jinyoung is still smiling at him when he opens his eyes. “Sorry.” 

“No. Don’t be sorry.”

Jaebum closes his eyes again; he takes a deep breath, suddenly feeling overwhelmed by the damn near domino effect the morning has been taking. How much time has even passed? He realizes as hot water starts to warm the cold tiled bathroom that he has no idea. With his eyes still closed, Jaebum says, 

“Yeah. Of course. Just—we’ll be out there when you’re done, and—“

Jaebum opens his eyes, intending to tell Jinyoung to just throw his bloodied clothes in the trash, but he’s met with the sight of Jinyoung’s arms over his head and the shirt he’d been wearing hiding his face from view as he unshyly strips it off. Jaebum feels his whole body do some weird, impossible  _ thing  _ when he sees the blood smeared all over him and crusted in tiny cuts, and even more so when he follows the curve of a hip and makes eye contact with the shallow dip of his navel. 

He sees Jinyoung’s thumbs hook into the elastic waistband of the hospital pants to pull them down and the alarm starts ringing in Jaebum’s head. 

Frantically, Jaebum slaps a hand over his eyes and swallows a horrified noise. He doesn’t see Jinyoung pause in confusion, pants pushed to his thighs, and doesn’t see Jinyoung take them all the way off because he turns around with his eyes still covered and desperately searches for the doorknob. 

_ Showering is a social norm for him, at least, but apparently modesty isn’t,  _ he thinks wildly, groping for the doorknob with his eyes closed and trying not to do any of the four hundred actions his body wants to do at once. Pass out? Turn back around? 

_ Look? _

Jinyoung, unbeknownst to Jaebum as he fiddles madly with the door, just stands there naked and confused as Jaebum’s fingers keep slipping off the brass knob and an awkward apology tumbles from his mouth. 

“I’m so sorry I’m so stupid I don’t know what I was thinking coming in here with you of course you know how to use a shower um I’ll be waiting out here with Jackson—“ 

Finally he gets a solid grip on the door handle. Still mumbling, whatever stupid words his stupid brain was supplying to his stupid mouth keep tumbling out even as he slips out of the bathroom door and pulls it shut behind him. Heart beating a thousand miles a second, he hears the showerhead turn on and the curtain pull and Jaebum puts his stupid face in his hands. 

_ Stop thinking about his body. Stop thinking about his body. _

It had just been such a surprise—he hasn’t really had a reason to look at Jinyoung  _ that way _ , and even though Jaebum has always looked at boys  _ that way,  _ he’s never acted on it. He’s only ever had girlfriends as temporary as they all ended up being. And yet, even in the middle of a morning where his brother has gone missing and this blood soaked stranger came forth from the woods like some biblical miracle, Jaebum leans against the bathroom door and can’t stop thinking about what a pleasant shock it had been to see part of Jinyoung’s body. 

He rubs his eyes furiously and swallows hard.  _ Get a fucking grip, Im Jaebum.  _

Thoughts and feelings a mess, he wanders back into the kitchen to sit at the table with Jackson. 

Before he even has a chance to sit down, Jackson is pushing his translucent yellow shades further up his nose with a finger like an inquisitive student. 

“So are you going to explain to me what the hell is going on?”

Jaebum sighs. “I’m not even sure that  _ I _ know.”

“You can start with Youngjae, for one thing, considering that he’s  _ gone.” _

He remembers, briefly, how yesterday felt so normal. Youngjae going to play with his friends, probably Dungeons and Dragons, the same thing they always play for hours upon hours on the weekends during the school year. With unlimited time during break it’s a wonder he ever saw his brother at all: between that and Pokémon it’s like his brother barely lived here. He remembers the odd feeling in his chest when Youngjae asked if he could sneak out to go spend the night at Yugyeom’s. It had been the first sign of him about to grow up: breaking the rules he knows he’s not supposed to break, and knowing that Jaebum would cover for him anyway. His heart resonates with pain and confusion. 

“He—you know how mom is. Keeps him under her thumb, basically, you know, after what happened with dad. But last night after she’d fallen asleep, he came in my room and asked me if he could ‘sneak out’ to go stay the night with Yugyeom.” Jaebum half heartedly chuckles. A noise from the bathroom makes him pause, but the shower resumes running and he continues, “I don’t know that it counts as sneaking out since he asked but I told him he had to be back in the morning before Mom woke up.”

“And he didn’t?” 

Jaebum shakes his head. “No. She went to wake him up and I had just woken up myself when I heard her yelling that he wasn’t in bed. I thought—I thought maybe he’d just stayed at Yugyeom’s even though I told him he had to come back, but then Mom called Mrs. Kim and she said that Youngjae and Bambam were going to spend the night at Bambam’s.” 

Jackson makes a face and Jaebum  _ hates  _ it because it carries the same amount of dread and confusion currently sinking his heart like a wrecked ship. 

“What? That’s so weird. He’s not usually like that.”

“I know. But—I just wrote it down to him being a kid. You know? So then she called Mrs. Bhuwakul, and she said—she said Bambam came home alone last night. Youngjae had told Bambam he didn’t feel good and wanted to go home so he was going to ride his bike home.” 

There’s a silent moment that passes between them, broken only by the low hissing of the shower running in the room next to them, both of them staring at each other as the story unravels and yet remains a mystery. Finally Jackson takes his sunglasses off and folds them to hang in his shirt collar. 

“If he was going to Bambam’s… why was his bike so far out? Near the park? Bambam and Yugyeom both live by the school. Right?”

“Yeah.” Jaebum swallows a sigh. “But he always goes to that park to play Pokémon. I fell asleep last night pretty much after he left to go to Yugyeom’s, so I think it’s possible he  _ did  _ come home this morning, but got bored and decided to ride his bike to the park now that the sun was up. And just—“ Jaebum chokes a bit and passes the back of his hand across his eyes. “And now he’s gone. His bike is all we have.” 

“And the guy you found in the woods. Covered in blood,” Jackson adds. There’s an undertone of sarcasm in his voice that Jaebum ignores. 

“Yeah. Just—I know it sounds crazy. And I know you believe me, somehow. But I just think—“ Jaebum pauses. “I just think he can help somehow. I think there’s a connection.”

“You really don’t think it’s just coincidence?”

Jaebum chews his lip a moment to consider this and then realizes that, no, he just doesn’t. “No. I really, really don’t. When I saw him, I don’t know… I got this overwhelming sense of what Youngjae would have said. That he was an alien or a spy or a ninja or whatever, you know? Little kid stuff. And the way he talks, the way he was covered in blood…” he trails off for a moment before finishing, “it has to be connected somehow. It just has to be.”

Jackson, surprisingly, nods along to this. “I get it. I’m a little skeptical but—I don’t not believe it. But it seems like he doesn’t talk much. How is this going to help?”

“I don’t know. He can understand things, clearly, and really well.” Jaebum vividly remembers how intense his eye contact always is, like he’s communicating telepathically with him, and tries not to blush. “I think he’s actually really, really smart but that his speech is kinda stunted. Like, I don’t want to jump to insane theories without knowing anything but it seems like the way he talks—“

“Is like someone who was locked away in secret for a long time,” Jackson finishes. “That’s what you were gonna say, right?” 

He nods. “Yeah. Plus the hospital clothes...”

Jackson picks up on his train of thought, continuing, “...the blood, the running away from something. Yeah. I can see that. You don’t think he busted out of an asylum or something?”

It’s certainly  _ possible,  _ but… Jaebum doesn’t think so. He expresses as much when he shakes his head and leans an elbow on the table to but his head in his hand. 

“I don’t think so. He came out of the woods and there’s nothing out there for hundreds of miles. Like, where would he have come from? So, no. I mean sure it’s possible, I guess, but there’s just—there’s this, I don’t know, look in his eyes, I guess. It’s too lucid for someone like that. And where’s the nearest asylum, anyway? The hospital is down town in the other direction. It’s just the only thing that makes sense even though it doesn’t. You know what I mean?”

“Sure. Yeah. And I mean, from what I’ve seen, he doesn’t seem dangerous. Just weird.”

Jaebum manages to crack a small smile at him. “We’re all a little weird. Right?” 

Jackson smiles back. “Right. If you think he’ll help, hyung, then we’ll do whatever we can. We will find him.”

There’s so much conviction in Jackson’s voice that he would be stupid not to believe it. And despite the fact that there’s a tiny, darkened section of his heart that thinks the worst has happened, that Youngjae is gone forever, he chooses to believe Jackson when he says that they’ll find him. 

_ It’s all we have. _

The shower in the other room turns off just as Jackson leans on his elbow, mimicking Jaebum, with a smirk a mile wide. 

“What?”

“He’s kinda cute, too, don’t you think?” Jackson asks, his grin spreading when Jaebum immediately starts to blush and makes a noise in his throat. “What?! Don’t tell me that you weren’t thinking it!”

“Thinking what?” Jaebum protests, pushing away from the table. “Why don’t you call Mark to get over here and stop harassing me—“

“Yah, I’m not harassing you! You think I haven’t seen the way you were checking him out?” Jackson scoffs. “You’re terrible at hiding it.”

The flush on Jaebum’s face that he  _ knows  _ is burning bright red to his ears deepens. “I am not, I haven’t even noticed—“

Jackson brays a laugh that once again has Jaebum threatening him from across the room. “You’re such an awful liar—!”

Just then, the both of them turn at the sound of the bathroom door opening. Jaebum watches with his cheeks still red and that funny fluttering feeling in his chest when Jinyoung quietly steps out of the bathroom dressed in the well fitting rust colored pants and black turtleneck that Jackson had so lovingly picked out for him. He blinks at Jaebum blankly from beneath the still dripping strands of his wet hair. 

_ I haven’t even noticed _ , he lies, fixated momentarily on the swell of Jinyoung’s lips.

“What?” Jinyoung says, and the confusion is audible in his voice. 

Jackson makes a noise when Jaebum sort of stutters; Jaebum turns around to shoot him a look that Jackson ignores on his way to the phone to call Mark. Jaebum tries to gather himself before he turns back around and faces Jinyoung who stands in the middle of the hallway like an awkward lawn ornament waiting to be placed outside. 

“Nothing,” he says gently. “You look…” he swallows. “Good.” 

Jinyoung looks down at himself. His bare feet press indentations into the long fibers of the carpet, the tops not quite covered by the slight flare of the rusty denim. He looks back up at Jaebum and blinks, once, before he smiles softly. 

“Good?”

“Yeah,” Jaebum confirms with a nod and another deep breath. “You look good, Jinyoung.” 

From behind them, there’s the  _ DING!  _ of the phone against the hook as Jackson hangs it up more aggressively than necessary, most likely to highlight the fact that Jaebum is going all tunnel vision for the weirdo standing in his hallway in clothes he’s likely never seen before. Jaebum turns to face him and the way his arms are crossed over the half unbuttoned shirt he’s wearing under a leather jacket has enough attitude to get the point across. 

“Mark is on his way.” 

Surprisingly, Jinyoung speaks next. 

“Who is Mark?” 

It’s amazing just how much suspicion he can manage to convey in his voice, typically so void of anything else. Jackson’s eyebrows raise and he looks at Jaebum like he’s responsible for answering. 

“He’s a friend,” Jaebum says. Jinyoung’s eyebrows furrow where he remains standing in the hallway. 

“‘Friend’?” 

“Yeah. Like Jackson is my friend. Um,” he turns, panicking a little, looking to Jackson for help explaining but Jackson just shrugs.  _ I don’t know either, man, don’t ask me.  _ Jaebum turns back to Jinyoung and notices how he’s gripped the opposite elbows with his arms folded over himself as if for protection. “People you like.”

From behind him, Jackson speaks up. Jinyoung eyes him warily. 

“Do you have friends, Jinyoung? Where you’re from?”

He tilts his head to the side just a fraction in that computing way that he does, and then shakes his head. Jaebum watches his long, slender fingers flex a little anxiously on his elbows and Jaebum’s heart constricts. Just how bad was it where he came from? If he came covered in blood and so removed from the rest of the world like this, so mistrustful of people and uncommunicative, just how bad was it where he came from? Jaebum finds that he’d really like to know but is too afraid to ask. 

_ I wish Youngjae was here,  _ he thinks to himself miserably.  _ Youngjae would ask without a second thought.  _

“No. We only knew Mom.” He hesitates for a moment and then fixes his eyes on Jaebum. “No friends.” 

_ “Mom?”  _ Jackson repeats, sounding a little uneasy. He moves to sit back down at the table now cleared of clothes and motions for both of them to join him. “What the hell does that mean?” 

It takes a little coaxing—Jackson’s question goes unanswered at first as Jaebum motions for Jinyoung to come closer. He just watches Jaebum and flexes his fingers against his elbows: he can’t help but think that Jinyoung is much like a skittish, beaten dog who is too afraid to get too close lest someone strike out against him. It makes him wish even more that Youngjae wasn’t missing. If there is anyone on earth who could make someone feel safe and calm, it’s Youngjae, with the kindness that radiates out of him and his checkerboard smile. 

God, they have to find him. They just have to. 

Jinyoung must see the look on his face change even a fraction; he steps closer to Jaebum and stares a hole through him. 

“Hurt?” 

Jaebum blinks in surprise. “What?”

Jinyoung, cautiously, eyes flicking to Jackson sitting at the table, creeps over to stand in front of Jaebum so closely that he can smell the scent of his own soap on Jinyoung’s skin. Now that he’s no longer covered in blood and his small cuts have cleaned, Jaebum can properly see the handsomeness of his strange face. So human, and yet the rest of him so foreign, uncharted territory that, deliriously, he finds himself aching to explore. Even for just a momentary distraction from the pain of missing. Even for a lifetime of it. 

His heart stutters once in its rhythm when Jinyoung points a finger to it on his chest, touching him. He looks into Jaebum’s eyes. 

“Hurt?” He taps it. “Hurts here, right?”

Jaebum feels the stinging in his eyes but refuses to let them water. He nods. “Yeah. It hurts there.” 

Jinyoung’s hand flattens to a palm on his chest. They’re not alone in the room; Jackson is watching all of this unfold from behind Jaebum with a sort of dumbstruck awe and maybe mild confusion, but the warmth of Jinyoung’s hand over his heart seeping through his shirt has faded everything else out until just the two of them remain. 

“We will find him,” Jinyoung says quietly, like it’s only meant for Jaebum to hear. “Then it won’t hurt.” 

Without thinking of how he’ll react, Jaebum reaches up to cover Jinyoung’s hand with his own where it still rests on the width of his chest. He thinks Jinyoung might flinch and pull away, but he doesn’t, and their eye contact only deepens as Jaebum swallows. 

“Thank you.” 

From behind them, Jackson clears his throat with an obvious sort of  _ ahem  _ sound to it, as though he’s aware he’s ruining a moment and doing it anyway. Jaebum doesn’t want to think of whatever just happened between him and the strange boy he’d found in the woods as “a moment”, exactly, but he’s not sure what else to call it. Either way, Jinyoung pulls his hand away at the sound of Jackson clearing his throat to grip his elbows again protectively and Jaebum turns around. 

“I’m thrilled you’re having a bonding moment with E.T., but he still hasn’t answered my question.”

Jaebum feels like punching him in the arm. Instead, he motions for Jinyoung to follow him so that they can join Jackson at the table. Jinyoung, sitting between them with his back to the door, doesn’t look at either of them and instead runs a single palm across the heavily lacquered surface of the formica tabletop. The sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window bounces a yellowy shadow up against the bottom of his handsome face.

“Who is Mom?” Jackson asks again, though softly, noticing when Jinyoung looks uncomfortable. “Like, your mom?”

Jinyoung keeps running a hand along the tabletop and doesn’t look at him. “No. Everyone’s mom.”

Helplessly, Jackson throws Jaebum a look where he’s sitting at the opposite end of the table. It says  _ what the hell does that mean?  _ But Jaebum, remembering the way that Jinyoung had reacted to him mentioning his mother in the woods, doesn’t really know either. He shrugs.

“So…” there’s a beat of awkward silence as Jackson tries to phrase his next question and Jinyoung looks up at him to watch him do it. There’s no real emotion on Jinyoung’s face from what Jaebum can see, but the blank sort of calculating look must be making Jackson very nervous because he swallows audibly before continuing, “um, like, your siblings? Like you had brothers and sisters?”

“No.”

Jackson looks at him and, again, Jaebum just shrugs.

“Jinyoung, where did you come from?” 

This seems to give Jinyoung actual pause. He blinks, then turns his head toward Jaebum as though Jaebum had been the one to ask, and just keeps staring at his face with his head kinda tilted like he’d done when he’d first found him running out of the woods. Jaebum wants to encourage him to answer, but… he’s not really sure  _ how.  _ All he knows is that Jinyoung’s face is handsome, and  _ human,  _ but with the sort of not-quite-human eeriness like he’d seen in Blade Runner.

But all Jinyoung can do is shrug in a mimicry of Jaebum and say, “home.”

“Where is--”

Jackson had been about halfway through saying  _ home?  _ when they hear a faint noise like tires in the gravel outside. Jinyoung, sitting between them, whips around in his seat toward the door so fast that Jaebum thinks he’s going to fall out of it: he doesn’t, though, and the kitchen falls into a hushed silence as they listen for the sound to get closer. 

A shape, faint and a bit far away like they’re at the end of the driveway, moves in front of the curtain hanging over the back of the couch. Jaebum’s heart starts pounding in his chest. Across from him, Jackson is frozen with his dark eyes wide and focused on the shape moving outside the window, person-shaped but humped, like the Hunchback of Notre Dame from the book Jaebum had read in one of his classes. None of them have the courage to speak.

From the corner of his eye, Jaebum sees Jinyoung twitch a little. He glances over, only seeing a ¾ view of Jinyoung’s face, but enough to see the way his head tilts a little like he’s listening closely to the noises coming from outside. The shape gets closer, the noise, louder; Jaebum realizes belatedly that the shape isn’t a monster at all but  _ Mark,  _ with an overstuffed backpack on his skinny back. The noise is an awful radio static coming from the walkie-talkie strapped to the handlebars of his bike.

Jackson, realizing this at the same moment, breathes a sigh of relief. “Thank god--”

Everything that happens next happens in a paradox of too slow and too fast, like someone had turned the clock of the world to run backward.

Mark, assuming (and correctly so) that the front door is unlocked, turns the knob with a shout already forming on his lips. He pushes it open a bit, going to step in; Jaebum can even see the raggedy tip of his beat-up white Converse as he does, his voice calling out to them. But there’s a feeling in the air that presses against them all and raises the hair on Jaebum’s arm like the moment before lightning strikes--Jaebum watches Jinyoung’s eyes change into hard, flat disks and his head tilt forward before the door slams shut in Mark’s face. Beneath his shout of pain and surprise, there is the very audible sound of the lock turning and the deadbolt sliding firmly into place. From the inside. _Across the room._

The only thing to break the astonished silence is the sound of Mark groaning on his porch. Faintly, they hear him whimper, “ow, my nose!” 

And, despite knowing they should go get Mark off the porch and patch the poor guy up from having a door slammed in his face, neither Jaebum or Jackson can move. Both of them are staring at Jinyoung, but Jinyoung just turns to Jaebum and looks blankly back at him as if to say,  _ now what?  _ A thick, violently red trickle of blood starts to leak from Jinyoung’s nose as their eyes meet. 

A barrage of thoughts hits Jaebum all at once in that moment. He senses Jackson quickly push himself out of his chair to tend to Mark, but it’s like the whole world has faded to leave himself and Jinyoung alone in the uncomfortable yellow chairs of his kitchen.

_ He’s not human. He can’t be.  _ But his heart knows this isn’t true--had he not already touched him? Felt the warmth of him, and the warmth of his hands? And what of the blood leaking from his nose now, red as his own? _ What would Youngjae say?  _ Cool,  _ probably, he would say. Never mind that he sensed Mark and shut the door with his mind, he also  _ locked it.  _ He can--he can do stuff with his  _ mind. 

From far away, he hears Jackson leading Mark inside and laying him down on the couch just inside the door. 

_ Youngjae would have been right. That he’s an--an alien. Or, no, that he’s a superhero. Isn’t that what he’d say? He can move things with his mind. Like--like Star Wars. Youngjae would know what to do about this.  _ Jaebum’s heart thumps painfully as Jinyoung keeps watching him, the depths of those eyes like galaxies, looking at him almost like he’s willing Jaebum to understand.  _ So if he can do that--was he locked up? Who had him--what--?  _

The thing that breaks Jaebum out of the whirlwind is the sight of the blood passing Jinyoung’s lips and the sound of the way he tries to snort it back up. 

He doesn’t say anything right away. He doesn’t know that he  _ could.  _ If there was any one thought in his head that he could focus on, then maybe he’d grasp onto it, but they’re all flying through him so quickly that it’s a blur even as he walks to the sink to grab a dishtowel and wet it. 

Jaebum gazes into the running water from the faucet. Jackson had said that maybe he had overlooked the possibility that maybe instead of being helpful, Jinyoung had been involved in Youngjae’s disappearance. But Jaebum doesn’t think so. 

_ He can help. He can really help.  _

“Hyung.”

Jinyoung’s soft voice behind him makes him jump. Jaebum jerks the handle of the faucet to turn the water off, a soaked rag hanging from his fingers that he wrings out over the sink before turning. 

“Come on,” Jaebum says, touching his wrist lightly, motioning with his head for Jinyoung to follow him. 

They pass through the kitchen, and Jackson lifts his head from where he’d been bent over Mark’s face and poking at the bones around his eyes like he’s trying to see if they’re broken. Mark, groaning, just lays in a weird, uncomfortable looking hump atop his backpack and gives Jaebum a half-hearted wave with one eye open.

“Yah!” Jackson barks at him; he must accidentally dig an elbow into Mark’s stomach or crotch because Mark groans and slaps his arm so hard it’s audible. “Where do you think you’re going?!” 

Jaebum nods his head sidelong at Jinyoung, just behind him, again like he’s using Jaebum’s body like a shield. “He’s bleeding. I’m going to clean him up and maybe I can get some answers out of him.”

When they’re shut up alone in the dusty silence of Jaebum’s room, Jinyoung stands by the closed door and looks around with his arms folded protectively over his chest. Despite how insane the past ten minutes have been, Jaebum can’t help but notice that the black turtleneck sweater Jackson had picked out for him from the pile accentuates the leanness of his shoulders and the small width of his waist where it’s tucked into the pants. He swallows nervously and in the shadowy silence of his room, it’s audible.

“Um,” Jaebum says awkwardly, feeling sort of like he did in the bathroom, as though he’s a fumbling newborn foal that isn’t sure what any of their limbs are for all of a sudden. The sunlight streaming in through the thinness of the curtain liners is weak and watery, the beginning of the afternoon clouded by seasonal raininess. It just adds to the feeling of mysteriousness with Jinyoung standing in the darkness of his room by the door and it definitely doesn’t help with the way his insides are feeling. 

Jaebum finds them just looking at each other again; Jinyoung’s eyes mere gleams in the gloom of his room in the weak light. There’s that sensation that Jinyoung is reading the inside of him, like he’s tuned in to some much deeper channel than people like Jaebum can access and he can see right through it all to the violently churning center of his darkened heart. Cold water from the excess of the rag in his hand drips down his wrist.

Jinyoung unfolds his arms long enough to point at it. “Why?”

This breaks Jaebum out of his trance. He sort of shakes his head like he’d been dreaming and motions for Jinyoung to come over, tapping the edge of the bed next to where he’s standing. 

“Come here.”

It’s a testament to how willingly Jinyoung has trusted him (and only him so far) that he does so with no sign of reluctance. Jinyoung sits gingerly on the spot that Jaebum had patted and watches as Jaebum drops slowly to his knees just to the side of Jinyoung’s legs where they’re pressed tightly together. His arms don’t unlock from across his chest, but the look in his eyes is almost gentle. Trusting. 

Jaebum lifts the rag to Jinyoung’s face. The blood has dripped down to his chin but nearly dried there, not getting on his clothes, and he touches the wetness of the rag first to the place where it had stopped. Startled, Jinyoung jerks his head back out of Jaebum’s reach and grabs his shoulder with strong fingers.

“Shhh,” Jaebum shushes gently, absentmindedly putting his free hand on Jinyoung’s wrist where the tendons flex as he grips Jaebum’s shoulder. The touch seems to calm him and he leans forward again, eyes a bit wide and trained on Jaebum’s face. “It’s alright. I won’t hurt you.”

Jinyoung’s answer is quick, and because Jaebum isn’t sure he has the capacity to lie, surprising in its naked honesty. “I know.”

It’s quiet for a moment as Jinyoung holds Jaebum’s shoulder and Jaebum touches his wrist and cleans the blood from his face. His heartbeat starts to race a little as he drags the wet rag across the thickness of Jinyoung’s bottom lip, watching the skin displace and then bounce back. He tries to push it aside and keeps gently wiping at the dried blood on Jinyoung’s face.

“Afraid?”

“Huh?” Jaebum pauses and looks into Jinyoung’s eyes.

Jinyoung taps the pulse point in Jaebum’s throat with the side of his wrist. “Heartbeat. It’s fast.” 

“Oh,” Jaebum says, and feels an ashamed blush warm his cheeks as he looks away and goes back to rubbing the blood off Jinyoung’s top lip. “A little bit.”

“Of me?”

And, like Jinyoung’s earlier answer, Jaebum’s is fast and honest. “No. Not of you.”

“For Youngjae.”

Jaebum takes a deep breath. “Yes. For Youngjae. But Jinyoung…” he hesitates; the blood has been cleaned from under Jinyoung’s nose and so he moves the rag away but stays crouched. “Where did you come from?”

Jinyoung just watches him for a moment. His eyebrows furrow like he’s unsure. “The woods.”

“Where in the woods?” 

His face screws up in a look like disappointment. “I don’t know how to say.”

“It’s okay,” Jaebum says softly. Jinyoung had let go of his shoulder and continued gripping his opposite elbows across his thin chest so Jaebum touches him gently on the knee. “Can you explain it?” 

“Big. Very quiet. There were no friends. No brothers or sisters. Other kids, but--” Jinyoung hesitates. “I don’t know them. It’s secret. And--lonely.”

Jaebum is both intrigued and disquieted by Jinyoung’s understanding of loneliness. He wonders if he feels it now, sitting in Jaebum’s room on a comfortable bed with someone who had cleaned blood off his face, and two friends in the other room. He wonders that, if Jinyoung helps them find Youngjae, if they can all unite in some common goal, that Jinyoung’s understanding of loneliness will go away. If he will no longer feel lonely, and Jaebum finds himself wondering if that would make him less lonely, too.

He swallows nervously. The scope of what they’re all about to do feels so big all of a sudden, like standing on the edge of a canyon and shouting down into it. But with Jinyoung’s help, he thinks that the four of them can do this, no matter how big it is. 

“You don’t have to go back there, Jinyoung, wherever it is. We’re going to find Youngjae together, and you never have to go back.”

  
  


-


End file.
